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Red Hat and SAP Bring SAP Applications to Virtual Servers

Red Hat Inc., the worlds leading business Linux distributor, announced earlier this week that SAP AG, a global provider of business software solutions, has certified the SAP NetWeaver platform on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) Advanced Platform 5. The certification includes the virtualization technology embedded in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for use with SAP applications.

SAPs certification means that all criteria necessary for full interoperability of Red Hat solutions with all modules of SAP NetWeaver are in compliance. All features included in RHEL Advanced Platform fulfill SAPs certification for mission-critical applications.

The two companies say that the combination of RHEL 5 and NetWeaver offers a complete solution stack through the integration of Red Hat Global File System, Cluster Suite, SELinux and further technologies for high availability, storage management and security. The virtualization technologies included in Advanced Platform have been successfully tested by SAP during the certification procedure and can be used in production environments after a general release of virtualized SAP application-based Linux environments over the course of the year.

The real news here, according to Dan Kusnetzky, principal analyst of the Kusnetzky Group, is that by certifying NetWeaver on RHEL 5s virtual machines, RHEL virtualization becomes much less of a neat technology trick and much more of a way for SAP customers to really get value from server virtualization.

"One of the challenges facing users of mainstream enterprise applications, such as those from SAP, is finding ways to use high performance, low cost, industry standard systems rather than having to rely on single-vendor, low volume, high price systems. Making best use of these industry standard systems usually requires adoption of some form of virtual processing software [the clustering software mentioned in the release], virtual storage software [the global file system software mentioned in the release] and management software for these virtualized environments," said Kusnetzky.